Drink up SF History: How Irish Coffee Came to America

The setup looks like a magic trick. Ten tulip-shaped champagne glasses side-by-side on a grated rail behind Buena Vista Cafe’s crowded saloon bar. Two cubes of C&H sugar drop into each glass. The bartender tips a pot of Peerless coffee and partly fills each glass down the line. A spoon follows, briskly pitching steam into the air. The heat is extinguished with a unbroken pour of Tullamore Dew whiskey and a white dollop of whipped cream. From beginning to end, every step is executed with the speed and precise timing of a magician. But the real trick is serving the remaining 1,990 glasses every single day to the throngs of people waiting to taste the 63-year-old recipe that marked Irish coffee’s American debut.

Buena Vista Café opened in 1916 in the bottom floor of a boarding house at the corner of Hyde and Beach. The tavern had a good view of the bay, and thirsty fisherman and dockworkers from San Francisco’s wharf drifted to the bar after work, made more noticeable by the pink neon sign installed in 1934.

5,000 miles away, Chef Joe Sheridan worked at a waterfront cafe in Ireland’s Foynes Harbor, a major wartime terminal for trans-Atlantic seaplanes. In 1943, after bad weather forced a Newfoundland-bound flight to return to the harbor during the night, Sheridan offered the dejected passengers warm coffee mixed with whiskey. When the American travelers asked if they were being served Brazilian coffee, Sheridan explained it was “Irish Coffee,” which he would later describe as consisting of “cream as rich as an Irish brogue, coffee as strong as a friendly hand, sugar as sweet as the tongue of a rogue, and whiskey as smooth as the wit of the land.”